Stick-and-ball sports fans often share the same question about NASCAR: What’s the big deal?

Why are so many fans attracted to a sport in which drivers seemingly spend hours racing around in circles?

The answer is simple, yet one most NASCAR fans—and competitors—don’t like to admit: They love to see racecar drivers wreck.

It’s not just the speed or the daring or the remarkable skill that it takes to drive a 3,400-pound stock car at 200 mph.

It’s the possibility that those drivers might wreck. They might slam into a concrete wall, go spinning wildly down the straightaway, flip their car end-over-end, fly into the catch fence, or simply run into each other.

And then remarkably climb out of their battered machines uninjured. And hopefully, as an added bonus, be ticked off at the driver who wrecked them.

Fans love to see NASCAR’s daredevils flirt with disaster and show the raw emotion that comes with a good day suddenly gone bad.

It’s similar to the attraction casual sports fans have for football’s bone-crushing tackles, hockey fights or a flagrant elbow in the NBA.

Deep down, sports fans like their games to be physical, emotional and even a bit violent.

And nothing is more physical, emotional or violent than a racecar driver slamming into a concrete wall, or another car, at 200 mph.

So NASCAR needs its drivers to wreck.

And there’s not nearly enough of that happening this season. As NASCAR chairman Brian France so bluntly put it a couple of years ago, NASCAR should be a contact sport, and so far this season, there has not been nearly enough contact.

There’s been some high drama—it doesn’t get much more dramatic than watching a jet dryer burn after a driver has crashed into it—and some good racing. But there’s been very little of what race fans want to see most.

Wrecks.

For some inexplicable reason, wrecks and caution flags are down this season. Way down.

Prior to last week’s race at Kansas Speedway, caution flags for wrecks or cars stalled on the track were down 44 percent. That number rose after the Kansas race, which featured just three cautions—only one for a wreck, and that was a single-car spin by a driver who had just blown an engine.

In the past two races, there have been a total of just five caution flags—four of them for debris on the track.

The lack of wrecks and caution flags led to a series of long, green-flag runs that sapped the excitement and drama right out of the event and left fans wanting more.

Take away the wrecks and you’ve got what casual sports fans think they know about the sport—just a bunch of cars running around in circles, turning left lap after endless lap and lulling its audience to sleep.

NASCAR is coming off two of its best seasons in recent memory, and one of the biggest reasons was NASCAR’s “boys have at it” mantra, which fueled both wrecks—many of them retaliatory—and outbursts of raw emotion. There has been little of either this season.

There are racing purists that enjoy watching a driver stretch out an 8-second lead, or a driver gradually reel in the leader, gaining on him a tenth of a second at a time.

And some enjoy watching crew chiefs calculate fuel mileage or plot pit strategy. Who love watching a crew chief bent over his laptop, agonizing over changing two tires or four.

But, unfortunately, those fans are in the minority these days, especially with the sport’s base of longtime, die-hard fans shrinking.

What NASCAR needs is more wrecks, more caution flags and less green-flag racing, particularly if it wants to attract more mainstream sports fans and build a younger audience.

Wrecks lead to caution flags, and caution flags are a welcome sight to NASCAR fans watching a three-hour event. They not only lead to bathroom breaks and snacks, but they bunch up the field, stacking drivers up side-by-side and bumper-to-bumper.

That’s when the racing is exciting, with drivers racing wheel to wheel and side by side, slamming into each other and trying to bump and nudge each other out of the way.

If they wind up wrecking—like the leaders did during a late restart at Martinsville—then the excitement level gets ramped up a notch.

And then, on the restart, they get to do it all over again, bumping, banging and wrecking right up until the checkered flag, bringing fans to the edge of their seats and leaving them feeling like they’ve witnessed a compelling event.

Unfortunately, there’s been a lot less of that this season, and no seems to know why.

Drivers, of course, aren’t going to climb into their cars with the intent of wrecking just to appease fans.

And NASCAR can’t manipulate the rules to create wrecks or caution flags (though that seems to be the philosophy at Daytona and Talladega).

But what NASCAR officials do need to do is figure out what has diminished the close, fender-to-fender competition that typically leads to wrecks and caution flags.

There’s a bevy of theories going around:

• With sponsors scarce and funding down, more drivers are trying to save their equipment.

• The new points system—implemented last year—has caused drivers to race more conservatively, protecting their positions and trying not to fall too far behind in the standings.

• A rise in start-and-park teams has thinned the field, eliminating some drivers that might be involved in wrecks.

• Some drivers that have a history of wrecking don’t have rides anymore.

Even the wind and weather were blamed for the shortage of wrecks at Texas and Kansas.

While those theories might have some merit, they each seem unlikely.

The most plausible explanation seems to be that the cars are so aerodynamic and over-engineered that they’ve become easier to drive. Coupled with tires that have too much grip and rarely wear out, drivers don’t have to fight as hard to maintain control of their cars.

The enhanced aerodynamics also mean that it’s more difficult for drivers to race close together, limiting side-by-side and bumper-to-bumper racing. As Jimmie Johnson said Tuesday, they're all running the same speed, making it more difficult to pass.

If that is the case, then that’s a problem NASCAR can do something about.

It’s developing a new Sprint Cup car for next season. NASCAR officials need to make sure that it’s less aerodynamic, harder to drive and one that puts the action back into the hands of the drivers and not the engineers.

It needs to be hard enough to drive that the top talent can rise to the top and that those drivers can race door-to-door and fender-to-fender.

That’s when they’re more likely to slip up and make a mistake.

That’s when they’re more likely to wreck, more likely to cause caution flags, more likely to have issues with other competitors and more likely to deliver the kind of compelling action fans want to see.